Facebook and Google seek FCC permission to activate a portion of the PLCN undersea cable, excluding Hong Kong and China's section amid ongoing regulatory battle
Tech giants' high-speed internet link to Hong Kong has become politically toxic — Google and Facebook seem to have resigned themselves …
Context & Ripple Effects
This filing is the opening move in a fight that has been building since mid-2019, when US officials first moved to block the Google- and Facebook-backed Los Angeles-to-Hong Kong cable over national security concerns. The DOJ escalated that opposition with a formal objection framing the landing as an espionage risk, which is why the two companies are now asking the FCC to light up only the segments that avoid Hong Kong and China entirely.
The arc since has validated the retreat: the FCC granted Google a partial operating permission covering the Taiwan leg but explicitly excluded Hong Kong, and by late August both companies had removed Hong Kong as a destination altogether, refiled for Taiwan and the Philippines, before Facebook eventually exited the Hong Kong-Americas fiber project under continued US pressure. What was pitched as an 8,000-mile direct link is being salvaged piece by piece.
First-order effects
- Google and Facebook get a path to activate revenue-bearing capacity on the US-Taiwan and Philippines legs immediately, rather than leaving the entire cable dark while the Hong Kong dispute drags on.
- Hong Kong loses the direct high-capacity connection these two platforms were set to deliver, concentrating their regional traffic onto the Taiwan and Philippines landings instead.
Second-order effects
- Competing cable consortia and Hong Kong's landing-station operators face a repriced market: any route touching mainland Chinese jurisdiction now carries a US approval risk premium that pure Taiwan/Philippines routings do not.
- Other US tech firms planning trans-Pacific capacity must assume DOJ and FCC review is mandatory, pushing new builds toward politically cleared destinations and raising costs for anyone who still wants a China-facing landing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, subsea cable licensing becomes a standing instrument of US-China tech decoupling — landing rights granted or withheld jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction, splitting what was built as a single global network into aligned segments.
- Cable consortia will increasingly be structured at the design stage around severable country sections, so that one denied landing does not strand the whole investment.
The trend: Trans-Pacific internet infrastructure is being redrawn along geopolitical lines, with US national-security review functioning as a de facto gatekeeper on where global platforms may physically land their networks.